Nate Hoffelder

Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader. He has been blogging about indie authors since 2010 while learning new tech skills weekly. He fixes author sites, and shares what he learns on The Digital Reader's blog. In his spare time, he fosters dogs for A Forever Home, a local rescue group.

Related Posts

15 Comments

Al the Great and Powerful17 January, 2017

“Reading a lot of books in a single calendar year takes careful planning, dedication, and a willingness to abandon awful books.”

Well, NO. All it takes is a love of reading, an adequate supply, and books you want to read (why start an awful book to begin with?)… it isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t need lots of preparation other than having things around to read. You could easily accomplish it at/by means of a library and never buy any books at all.

Read short books? I have about 30 books on Amazon and 26 of them are less than 100 pages on average and the other 5 are 200-300 pages. They are all in a series. People read all of them in 2-4 days. Thats 30 books for you there in less than a weel. My content is not skimpy either. It is however very moorish. ie you just want more and more.

I regularly read over 200 books a year and I very rarely put down a book as DNF.(In the whole of my life [I’m 42], I think I’ve only ever “DNFed” two, or maybe three, books. And I’ve been reading over 200 books a year for at least the last 20 years.

If a book is written well, I will give it a chance. It’s only poorly edited (full of grammatical and spelling errors) books that I will abandon. If a book is written well but deadly dull, I might skim-read it, but I still read it from cover-to-cover.

Also, it is not necessary to buy books if you have easy access to a library. In 2016, roughly 150 of the 206 books I read were thanks to my local library. Only 50 or so were books that I own.

I think the only thing you have to do is read. I ramped up from around 40-50 books a year to a personal best last year of 157. Mostly fiction – literary, crime, graphic. To get there I cut out a lot of the time I was wasting on unsatisfying TV and YouTube black holes.

I read for pleasure and to challenge myself. I read one book at a time. I finish everything I start.

Totally agree with those points and following almost all of them last year I indeed read 101 books.
I am posting the link to my 101 reviews with dates 😉 below as I kept writing a brief on what I have read on my blog just to keep a track of dates and what all I have read.
Now it has become a habit of sorts and I just finished the fourth book of the year.
Although like you said – I have now become choosy and picking up what I like these days.

I don’t think it is hard. It comes down to a few key principles:
– Consistency. If you read daily, then going through this goal is a lot easier. You just need to read every single day and you’ll make constant progress.
– Read what you like. The material must interest and passionate you.
– Use audiobooks. There are a lot of down times where it is hard to physically read, for example, when walking down the street or having breakfast. An audiobook allows you to take full advantage of that time.
– Use a Kindle. Easy to carry, easy to purchase a new book and generally more convenient than a paperback. I suggest against an iPad since you want to have charge available 24/7, which rarely happens with a tablet.

The most important factor here is consistency. This is true for anything in life. The more days you miss, the more you need to compensate. If you start on January 1st and you read consistently until December 31, you’ll finish a great deal of books and remember a great deal of information.